Green Authoritarianism

Environmental hazards are just the kind of threat—the enemy—which authoritarian regimes need. A main purpose of Lean Logic is to argue that there is another option: lean thinking, which does not tell people what to do, but sets up a clear frame of reference which stimulates—pulls along—the ingenuity and intelligence of people to develop their own responses.

Green authoritarianism starts innocently with sensible-sounding regulation, and then grows without limit: it has the advantage that it never has to be argued through because it short-circuits straight to the begged question: “You have to do [whatever the government happens to want you to do today] in order to tackle climate change—and if you make trouble, you are clearly an enemy of the planet.”

Green authoritarianism fails to activate citizens’ intelligence and motivation; it refuses to recognise the decisive significance of local detail; it discards the potential of trust and imagination; it does not understand incentives; it presents environmental action in terms of adversarial politics, instruction and surveillance; it is committed to the impossible task of protecting the status quo, rather than going along with the creative evolution of the Wheel of Life; it guarantees failure; it lacks presence and it is bad manners.